Bob Ford's Video Blog

Penn Weare, Portland
Friday September 6th 2013

As we often do on our weekly walk on Portland today we chose to take the old railway line along the Eastciffs.
Half-way along we noticed a grasshopper caught in the web of a garden cross spider.
By the time I had got my camera set up the grasshopper had been wound-up in the spider's silk and I assumed that I had missed all the action.
But when I got home and examined the video I noticed that I had caught the moment when the spider delivered the fatal bite.
In this sequence I have repeated a section in slow-motion, but you still have to look very closely.

Notice that after the bite the spider leaves the scene.
It's not that she is just not hungry (the big fat ones are all females),
she is waiting for the toxin in her bite to take effect.
When she returns in an hour or two the insect's tissues will be liquified ready to be sucked out. Nice.

We were really looking for some adonis blues, but never found any.
This egg-laying female was thought to be one but in retrospect it looks more like a chalkhill.

It was actually a very quiet day as far as wildlife was concerned, with hardly any birds being seen at all.
However we did see the paddle steamer Waverley ...